“A beautiful, scarily assured debut, a collection of small moments that add up to a pointillist wonder.” — Scott Tobias, AV Club

Opening with an incredible tracking shot through the world it occupies, Neighboring Sounds assures us from its first aurally-saturated moment that we’re in the hands of a deft and daring new visionary. A slow-building thriller refracted through the languorous, meandering lens of Altman at his best, director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s first narrative feature floored festival critics upon its release. A lyrical graph of an affluent Brazilian seaside neighborhood, the film is a cryptically naturalistic character study of over a dozen divergent occupants of one street — servants, criminals, lovers, dangerously close-knit families. The pensive everyman at the film’s masterfully soundscaped center is João, whose mild investigation into a petty theft splinters in more directions than would be sensible for a lesser director. These loosely-stitched slices-of-life culminate in a daylight noir dense with tenderness and dread, a nuanced exploration of Brazil’s famous socio-economic tensions, and a sweetly melancholy commentary on surveillance, technology, and co-habitation. Fans of intelligent drama won’t find a film more intriguing and engaging than this.
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2013, digital presentation, 131 min.